Techniques exist for displaying information to computer users in ways that allow the users to gain an understanding about characteristics of information making up a display. For example, computer users employing design tools, such as tools for designing fixed or floating point computing systems, may wish to display information about the number of times a particular bit in a register is written or read. Continuing with the example, a user may be working with a fixed point register having a width of 8 bits. When designing a system that will use the register, the user may wish to know how many times each of the 8 bits is written or read for a particular design. In this example, the user may run a simulation of the system and then access simulation results containing data written to and read from the register as well as information about other register interactions.
In conventional design systems, the user may visualize simulation results/information using histogram displays that show a number of occurrences or events associated for each bit, or bin, of the register. The amplitude of displayed information in the histogram may vary depending on the number of occurrences for a respective bin. When a user is working with systems having more than one register, the user may have to toggle between histograms for each register because histogram displays typically take up a relatively large portion of an available display area. For example, when histograms are displayed in a small window, information displayed in the histogram can become so compressed that a user cannot glean relevant simulation details from the small window.
Toggling between appropriately sized histogram display windows can make it difficult for the user to make comparisons from one register to another because information for the two or more registers cannot be displayed simultaneously. Also, one or more histogram display windows may occupy so much display area that the user may be unable to display other types of information that might be useful for determining whether a design is satisfactory. For example, a user may wish to see code associated with variables stored in the registers, debugging information associated with the registers, overflow and/or underflow information for the registers, etc. The user may be unable to view adequate quantities/types of other information because the histogram display windows occupy too much of the available display area.